I'm half and half on the subject. My philosophy on pirating is if I like what I'm pirating then I'll go and purchase it. It's like checking the product out thoroughly instead of taking the risk of picking it up, glaring at the box for a few minutes and thinking "Should I spend 15 bucks on this?". Things like music CDs and DVDs/Blu-rays aren't exactly dirt cheap so before I buy them I'd like to make sure I like the product enough. Even if it's my favorite band or if it's a movie by my favorite director, I want to make sure I don't waste 15 big ones on what could be their worst movie and a complete waste of money of which I'll gain little to nothing back on. It's through this method that I ended up getting into a lot of TV shows and subsequently buying them.

I'm not a shameless pirate. I understand the fact that people put a lot of work into some of these things and need to be reimbursed for their work to make the world go round, yadda yadda yadda, but at the same time, why does that mean I have to throw money at things I'm not totally sure of?

That being said, the only thing I don't pirate is video games. I'm usually very sure in what games should be good enough to waste money on and the ones I don't, I rent and see first. Why don't I just rent movies and TV series too? Could you imagine the money that you would need to back that up? At least there's so very few good games/interesting games out there at a time my ending bill from Blockbuster isn't through the roof.

My parents taught me to share. Sharing is caring.

I'm using mostly opensource softwares and I almost stopped downloading music a while ago (though my mp3 list is quite long since several years). I also think pirating is quite bad.

I used to pirate some music because I really had no monney for it. Now that I have some, I can buy some legal mp3 on web-stores. World music has been severly injured by pirating and it is little sad.

I still continue downloading animes, because most animes will never have a version in France (and I still do not understand japanese without subtitles for import DVD ;) ) or only in several months. I also download some japanese music just because I cannot buy most of it in cd stores of my region.

Well I have nothing against it just that it destroys lives and cultures. If you buy pirated cds the culture shown in that particular film is already wasted. Cause instead of having many proceeds for their country/state, your money went into the pockets of the ones pirating movies and whatever...

It's definitely wrong, but sometimes it may be difficult to find a selling copy of the software or file, so it's kind of necessary. All in all though, it's not benefiting companies since it strips revenue from them, but maybe the companies need to lower their prices.

I'm against software piracy, but I occasionally download songs. I try to buy music though, since if no one buys it, the music industry will fail. Some bands give their songs for free download, and make money from touring. So maybe thats the way music's gonna go soon?

I think paying $20.00 for an album just so I can get the one song... is a crime in itself.
On the other hand I rarely buy pirated anime. Majority of my anime collection is legit, it cost me thousands and some.

I don't like pirating and the such but at the same time sometimes its the only way, for example a lot of my music you can only download because they're demo/unreleased material

And another example of this, and this is something a lot of people can relate to, is Sailor Moon, which is only accessible to western countries through piracy because no one at the moment holds the rights to it and hasn't been released to normal retail outlets yet.

So yeah in the end it really depends on accessibility and affordability and if you can sleep with yourself at night in doing it

I wouldn't have bought three-quarters of the DVDs & CDs I own if I hadn't pirated the stuff first. It's essentially a test-run, if you like it then you can go out & buy the official thing, if not then you're not wasting any hard-earned money. =D

If we just look at the pc game market...
we can notice those eyes blowing prices and system requirements... while games itself doesn't improve very much (neither in graphic nor in gameplay). So after buying few junk games, ordinary man will turn to piracy... and he will stay with it or just use it for game testing...

ah and if you look on modern games you will see tons of anti-piracy protections, which mainly hurts those who bought original games... so if companies harm their clients, why they even are surprised that clients turns from them and go to pirate market?

Well its not healthy for the economy... Muahahaha

Tactical nuke target much? lol

Pirating is for poor little *bleep bleeping bleep bleep's* that have no money, no job and live in they're moms basement. If you cant afford to pay for the stuff you want to watch then you should be focusing more on you're life then stealing software off the internet.

Well .. most of the things here have already been said.
However: I believe this is really an important question as due to this "problem" especially european governments cut the human rights of their citizens.

It's correct that piracy - in general - is a problem. But it's wrong to count the way the music industry and all the other industries do: every downloader was a potential buyer. It's just wrong.

First: why the hell does the industry have to trick us into buying a pig in a poke? Why aren't we allowed to fully test a product before we actually decide on whether to buy it or not? If it's software, I demand the software to run 30 days at its full potential. If I don't like it by then, I'll uninstall it - if I do like it, I'll most likely buy it.
If it's a song - I want to listen to the full version! And several times even. And that applies to all songs. I want to be able to grab the songs I like and only pay those - or just delete all. I don't want to pay an album just because I like 2 or 3 songs out of it.
I don't want to be paying cinema tickets for a movie I am not convinced in. I want to be sure that I'll like it before I go there - the tickets cost about 10euro (7-12euro) depending on where and how. This is a huge lot and thus I can't afford to be let down. The problem is: this is VERY often the case. The reviews are not enough though, because a movie like "Kei hei hup (metallic attraction)" was considered pretty shitty, but I'd have watched that in cinema if it were here, because it's awesome in my opinion. Trailers lie pretty often as well (e.g. Terminator 3, which was a huge let down).

So if you consider all this.. then you can say that the piracy is not one-sided - the media pirate us too, they take our money and promise us everything just to lure us into cinemas or into buying music just from listening to 30 seconds of it (or only particular "good" songs, while making us pay for the rest as well).

If these media groups don't change their attitude and distribution systems - nothing will ever change.

I do pirate stuff - especially, because it's easy to get ones hands on it if you're russian. In Russia (or Ukraine for instance) you can buy software on original looking (not burned, but factory-pressed) CDs. They contain keys, cracks and whatever it needs for the software to run.
However: I earned a huge lot by using Photoshop and thus I already bought PSD CS1 - just because it's incomparable to anything (yeah I know many of you folks will start saying "take a look at Gimp, Paint.NET, Corel Painter" etc.. I did - it all is not nearly as productive as PSD is). I invested some hundrets of Euro into that, because it's intuitive (not easy to use, but easy when you know how stuff works) and the results are industry-standard.
I further got a legal license of Windows 7 and Office 2007 - simply because the software is good in my opinion (and it was cheap at that moment).

So bottom line is:
if the music and video industry wouldn't mock us and would make interesting movies and good music and offer fair pricing models, I'm sure there would be less need to download torrents. People would buy the songs they want while trying all songs. I wouldn't even want to spare some space for songs I don't like - so I certainly wouldn't keep them.
As to anime: just an example: Mai HiME came out in Germany about 2 years later than I watched it from Static-Subs (and I downloaded it when it was already finished) --> about 2,5 years difference... this can't be - or this shouldn't be.
Another thing is: all people talk about globalization etc. But how am I supposed to buy stuff if I don't know Japanese and don't want to pay those horribly high shipping costs? I saw but one DVD (Japanese R2, Tenchi Muyo in Love! Special Edition, 9600yen originally, I payed 70euro) that offered English audio and subtitles right off the Region2. This shows how ignorant the Japanese are. They are not really interested in selling the shows world wide - except they are already very successful in Japan. So I don't feel guilty in the slightest if I pirate those movies/anime and don't buy them from ADV or something. ADV themselves offer bad synchronization and subtitles - most fansubbing groups have better fansubs and those are even colored.

So as long as Anime DVDs that come out in Germany won't have simply amazing advantages in terms of translation- and sub-quality as well as dub-quality over the fansubs, I'm not buying any of those. I'd rather donate to a fansub group or even buy a bootleg (need to be careful here though, because many bootlegs are pretty to look at, but the quality sucks TERRIBLY - best example was Ayashi No Ceres: nice box, shitty video quality, just average audio quality and utterly bad subtitles).

Sorry for my long opinion - but that's just what I feel about this topic.
dS.

I don't have that big of a issue with Pirating...
Software is so freak-in expensive so if you Pirate something like a game and you enjoy the game go and buy it, otherwise you are wasting your money.

I'm totally against it, I also hate the Pirate party that actually reached 2% in my government's election this year (which is quite alarming imo).
I generally don't like to get something for free which some1 has worked hard on. If you really appreciate some1's work you should support him/her.
I only download anime that isn't licensed here, because else I have no possibility to get it. When I have the money I buy the DVDs if the show is released here.
I also still prefer going to the cinema instead of watching crappy rips illegally on my comp. It's an insult to the movies to watch crappy cam rips and stuff like that.

I don't buy pirated stuff, but i will download it. Though I can't say I've never bought pirated stuff. I bought a few bootlegs when I was younger, not realizing they weren't the legit thing. The quality of the videos and subs soon made me realize that something was wrong. Since then, I've always bought legit.